Musings on "Web Therapy" and "Afterbirth" after attending DCNF

by Dan Bucatinsky

(L-R: Digitas Worldwide CEO Laura Lang, Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky)

I travelled to DCNF with Lisa Kudrow (my partner at Is Or Isn't Entertainment) and Dani Klein Modisett (my partner in "Afterbirth: stories you won't read in a parenting magazine") with open minds and managed expectations.  We were blown away by the convergence of talent, technological innovation and inspirational thoughts on New Media -- and the role we play as content providers in building this idea of COMMUNITY.

Lisa and I have our third season of the Lexus sponsored "Web Therapy" under our belts and a new iPhone App about to launch next week.  We also have an exciting venture with Showtime to air longer versions of our web content early next year.  We've been feeling like innovators and were eager to surround ourselves with others.  How great to be around Ben Silverman and Seth Green and Ariana Huffington -- all working on the front lines of this New Media front -- along side of us -- and many running paces ahead, charting new territory! What an inspiring experience it was for us to talk with brands and other content providers about the way in which we look at our business and our role as content providers.  We were inspired by the idea of building community and are eager to expand our approach to our creative work to be not only envelope-pushing, and, of course, hilarious -- but also to bring people together -- to interact with us -- and to create a feeling of belonging.

Having been given the wonderful opportunity to be one of the few chosen to PITCH new content at DCNF, Dani Klein Modisett and I were amazed by the passion driving this New Media "movement" -- is any other word more apt than "movement"?

Had we known this going in to our pitch for "Afterbirth..." we would might have done fewer jokes and talked more personally and passionately about the deeper truths of the development of this show/book and now web series.  Afterbirth has amazed us in every major city we have showed up to including San Francisco, Boston, New York and our home town Los Angeles by the number of people who turn up consistently and with utter devotion.  Afterbirth speaks to all parents, single, gay, divorced, married, grandparents, there isn't a person who is a parent or frankly has a parent who isn't moved to laughter and sometimes even tears by the honest representation, done with tremendous courage and great wit and most of all heart, that this show and book brings to anyone who is introduced to it.  The impetus for expansion to the web, which we did mention at the show, is to allow people who can't get out of the house for whatever reason, to join forces with those people who can.  It is the best way to help parents who feel isolated and alone, and what parent doesn't at some point, connect to other parents just like them.  We came away from New Front inspired to keep reaching out and by the singular opportunity that the web offers to reaching and interacting with an even greater audience.

Thank you Digitas and Third Act for this great day and we look forward to continued involvement.


Guest Post from Teri Hatcher!

How exciting to be at Digitas, The NewFront event in New York! We had a lovely kickoff dinner last night mingling marketers and talent like no other event. Its fascinating to  be mining where brands and a personality organically fit and the conversations had my mind on creative overdrive.  
(Which I love even when it keeps me awake) The focus on women creating content for the web and also being consumers on the web is particularly powerful. Its an exciting time to be a woman in that position, creating content for women, but creating it as if it were for me!   When Disney's Family.com gave me an opportunity to create a site, Gethatched.com,  a community to offer woman a chance to rediscover themselves, to find fun in all the effort they put out every day for others, I was thrilled to partner with them. Disney has reached tens of millions of moms, and this site is for all women, helping them "hatch," if you will, new inspiring ideas, vision and advice for their daily lives.  Gethatched has the benefit of growing within a structure solidly in place that reaches millions and millions of women.

At Get Hatched we know women are a force to be reckoned with. So we've given them  "A Chick’s Guide to Life." Its filled with content by women and for women. Women collectively  have a lot of know-how,  so we've  harnessed that knowledge, insight and humor; the kind  that comes during any gathering of women talking and sharing their stories. Throughout my life,  it’s been my girlfriends who've come to the rescue with perspective, advice, a laugh and a hug. And that's the kind of community we are extending to women around the country, loaded with content that's valuable and high quality. We also know that as women we take on many labels; Moms, Wives and Breadwinners. And that can leave us  overwhelmed by daily to-do lists thus forgetting how to find the fun in any given day. Whether they're craving advice,or want to be inspired to shift from surviving their life to Living it, or just a place to share without judgment, GetHatched is meant to be an anchor in their daily lives where they can feel connected by the fact that we're all just trying to get by.

Through the site, we’re able to interact with women in many different ways. And as a woman who can relate to everything from trying to find "ME TIME" or a date or a recipe, I'm able to write blogs where our users can comment and ask questions.  I also do a webisode series called “I’m not Your Therapist But….” In it, I just sit, press record on a mini camera and answer the questions that our users have asked, from what to feed a toddler to feelings on divorce to whether or not pantyhose are ever going to make a comeback. (In my humble opinion, the answer is no!)  it has a very intimate personal quality. In the video series Chick Chat, I connect with and have fun talking to women across the country in a live conversation. I also interview celebrities for the web series In the House, which is actually shot in my home, complete with my pet bird  squawking in the background.  Beyond video and blogging, we let women know what’s happening with the site via  Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as a community on Family.com. We created GetHatched to be the kind of place we, as women, would want to go. And we think it is! Check it out at www.gethatched.com.

Introducing the DCNF 2010 Emcee, Daphne Brogdon

Cool Mom and emcee of this year's Digital Content Newfront, Daphne Brogdon (and her son Rex) talks about the new FTC blogger rules, promotion and transparency on the web.

A Brief Introduction to Fan Theory

by Abigail de Kosnik (Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley)

The digital age has facilitated an explosion of fandom, as millions of people gather online to watch their favorite videos, comment on their favorite political and lifestyle blogs, and circulate images of their favorite celebrities/texts/products.  But well before the personal computer, the Internet, the Web, or any mobile device were components of everyday life for large portions of the U.S. population, a strand of academic scholarship called "fan theory" was studying what ordinary people were doing (with pen and paper, cloth and scissors, and many other non-/pre-digital technologies) to express their emotional responses to the consumer commodities that surround them, and from which they are daily asked to choose. 

One of the most influential early theorists of fandom was Dick Hebdige, the British sociologist and media theorist currently on faculty at UC Santa Barbara, whose 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style defended what were thought of as frivolous and irrelevant choices - what clothes to wear, what kinds of music to listen to, how to do one's hair - as highly meaningful and crucial to many people's sense of identity.  Style, argued Hebdige, is often "a form of Refusal" - that is, refusal to "fit in" with what was perceived as homogenous "mass culture."  Even if the styles that people adopted as tools for self-expression were derived from mass culture (punk rock music, youth gang films), those mass-produced objects were still highly useful in helping people to display themselves as unique individuals. 

Another major pioneer of fan theory was Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at USC, whose 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture emphasized that fans are not wholly or always or purely admirers of their favorite commodities.  Fandom is motivated by both "fascination" and "frustration," Jenkins said.  Fans of a certain TV show, for instance, usually deeply love that TV series, but also are constantly annoyed that the show is not giving them enough of what they want, or is developing (over the years that it airs) in different directions than the fans would wish.  This simultaneous feeling of being attracted to and angered by the object of fandom is precisely what makes fans want to actively work on those objects, by writing letters to the TV show's producers or network, or by writing alternate storylines for the show in "fan fiction," or by sharing their criticisms and commentary with other fans.

Sarah Thornton, a sociologist and widely-read writer on topics related to art and the art market, wrote a book called Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital in 1996 that illustrated how fans of a given object (Thornton was studying electronic music and the club scene) gathered to form "taste cultures," in which they prioritized their consumption of common media, their sharing of specific likes and dislikes.  Taste cultures, Thornton argued, establish their own hierarchies, often very different from "normal" society's cultural hierarchies, and participating in a taste culture often means teaching newcomers those particular hierarchies and enforcing the shared sense of what is "hip," "authentic," and "real" (vs. "phony" and "mainstream").   

Although Hebdige, Jenkins, and Thornton all wrote these major works before the digital age began in earnest, they gave us several important frameworks that are very pertinent today for understanding fandom as it plays out on social media sites and other types of Internet communities, and as it evolves across media platforms.  From Hebdige, we learned that fans don't just consume commodities that are marketed to them; rather, fans use commodities to express themselves.  From Jenkins, we learned that fans are often both "pro-" and "anti-" the objects of their fandoms, and their participation in fan groups is motivated by a complex emotional investment, and a quest to share their manifold emotions about a given commodity with others who feel similarly.  From Thornton, we learned that fans come together to create status hierarchies based on shared expertise and values. 

Fan theory has been a going concern in academic circles for over thirty years, and the analysis and observations of fandoms' early theorists are still relevant today.  This has been a quick intro to three of the major scholars of fan behavior and fan communities, but there are a great many other researchers and writers in cultural studies, film and media studies, sociology, literature, and other fields who continue to publish fascinating insights about how fandoms develop. 

“Afterbirth…stories you won’t read in a parenting magazine”

By Dani Klein Modisett

First there was the live "Afterbirth..." show, no that’s not true, first there was me sitting home trying to breastfeed my newborn. It was not working. The baby was crying, I was crying, and no other fluids were being exchanged between us.  I’d been a comic for ten years before having this baby and knew the only way I was going to get through this challenge, and a whole host of new and daunting experiences that lay ahead of me as a parent, was going to be if people with great courage and an even greater sense of humor, who had gotten to the other side and lived to laugh about these moments, told me their stories.  

I had a beer (because they tell you to when you're trying to nurse) and immediately called every comic and comedy writer parent I knew and asked if they would come perform on a show I was creating called “Afterbirth…stories you won’t read in a parenting magazine.” I asked each of them to write about the moment they knew their life had changed forever becoming a parent.  That moment when you think, "Oh s*&t, if only I'd stayed in that one room apartment ordering in chinese food alone I never would have gotten in to this mess."  Six weeks later (and six years ago) the first "Afterbirth..." live show was performed before a raucous, standing room only, crowd.  Last year, an anthology of stories from "Afterbirth..." was published by St. Martin's Press.  “Afterbirth…” now performs in major cities across the country to sold out audiences.  The caliber of talent that has come out to tell the truth about the good, the bad and the ugly of being a parent today in front of a live audience has inspired not only each member of the audience where it appears, but also a whole exploding genre that I call, "Flawed parenting as entertainment."  

“Afterbirth…” the web series will take you front and center to the hippest comedy club, where people funnier than your friends regale you with raw, candid, laugh out loud stories that are guaranteed to make you feel less alone in the specific way in which you are screwing up your kids.  With contributors like Emmy winners Dana Gould, Lew Schneider, Cindy Chupack, Rick Cleveland and “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, and writer/performers like Patricia Heaton,  Caroline Rhea, Peter Horton, Moon Zappa, Caroline Aaron, Andrea Martin, “Glee’s” Mike O’Malley and many, many, more, each webisode will deliver heartwarming laughter to the viewer with out anyone having to hire a babysitter, tip a valet guy, or be relegated to  “designated driver” status.

Our “Afterbirth…” team, including Webby-winning executive producer Dan Bucatinsky (co-creator/producer/actor, "Web Therapy," and "The Comeback"), esteemed new media agent Nathan Coyle (CAA) and of course me, Dani Klein Modisett, creator/exec producer of "Afterbirth....," are eager to find creative and authentic ways to integrate your brand in to what promises to be the internet’s very own “Modern Family.”  A show with all the vibrancy and freshness of this network hit, that also delivers the immediacy of live performance that has become a huge force in other leading TV shows like “Glee,” “So You Think You Can Dance,” and, of course, "American Idol.”

For press on “Afterbirth…,” the show and the book, please visit www.afterbirthstories.com. 

To become part of the growing "Afterbirth..." family, please contact Nathan Coyle,

ncoyle@caa.com.